11. ‘Gassed’ (1919) by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

Image credit: Wikipedia

‘Gassed’, from the collection of the Imperial War Museums, was a star attraction in the National Portrait Gallery’s WW1 centenary 2014 exhibition The Great War in Portraits. For the exhibition’s curator, Paul Moorhouse, the painting is, in his words, ‘this harrowing image’ showing the ‘terrible consequence’ of a gas attack. In 2010 the British journalist and television presenter Jon Snow hailed it as one of the ‘10 Best British Artworks About War’.

But how effective is the anti-war message of the painting, I wondered, when I first saw it.

Like Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, another celebrated masterpiece with a war theme, ‘Gassed’ is a very large work of art. Measuring 231.0 by 611.1 centimetres (7 ft 6.9 in × 20 ft 0.6 in), it shows a line of ten wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station while a similar train of eight wounded, escorted by two orderlies, advances in the background.

Sargeant’s work was voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. Could the fact that he was American have played a part? Anglo-American relations had reached a high point under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, with the United States joining the Allies when it declared war on Germany in April 1917.

The artist had been commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war including portraying collaboration between British and American forces. He had visited the Western Front in July 1918 when he spent time with the Guards Division near Arras. There was then a further spell with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres. 

‘Gassed’ did not meet with universal approval. Art critic Gary Haines quotes an article in the May 1919 issue of the literary magazine The Athenaeum in which the artist was accused of having created a masterpiece of mawkishness, ‘a reproduction of which many a young lady will hang up in her boudoir’ to contemplate ‘in sentimental moments’.  

Later that year, the art critic and historian P.G. Konody revealed he was similarly unmoved by ‘Gassed’: ‘I cannot help feeling that this calm procession of gas-blinded men, carrying their trench coats, rifles and other paraphernalia as though they were returning from a pic-nic, is singularly unconvincing,’ he wrote in The Observer of 14 December.  

Portrait of E.M. Forster in 1924-1925 by the English artist Dora Carrington (1893–1932). Image credit: Wikipedia

For a pacifist like the English writer E.M. Forster, ‘Gassed’ was a deformity of the truth. He was scathing about the work in his essay Me, Them and You, published in 1936 in the book Abinger Harvest. However he seems also to have disapproved personally of the artist, describing him in the essay as 'a man who spends much time dangling after the rich'! 

This is how Forster dismissed the painting :

‘A line of golden-haired Apollos moved along a duck-board from left to right with bandages over their eyes. They had been blinded by mustard gas. Others sat peacefully in the foreground, others approached through the middle distance. The battlefield was sad but tidy. No one complained, no one looked lousy or over-tired, and the aeroplanes overhead struck the necessary note of the majesty of England. It was all that a great war picture should be, and it was modern because it managed to tell a new sort of lie. Many ladies and gentlemen fear that Romance is passing out of war with the sabres and the chargers. Sargent’s masterpiece reassures them. He shows that it is possible to suffer with a quiet grace under the new conditions, and Lady Cowdray and the Hon. Mrs. Langman, as they looked over the twenty feet of canvas that divided them, were still able to say, ‘How touching,’ instead of ‘How obscene.’’

For Forster, as he concludes in Me, Them and You, the gassed victims in Sergeant's painting represent 'the slush and dirt on which our civilization rests, which it treads under foot daily, which it sentimentalizes over now and then, in hours of danger'.  

Vera Brittain photographed shortly after WW1. Image credit: Wikipedia

Mustard gas in particular seemed for many people to be the ultimate in the obscenity that war had become.  Vera Brittain, the VAD nurse whose WW1 memoir Testament of Youth was published in 1933, certainly shared the popular revulsion. In a letter of 5 December 1917 to her mother Edith Mary Brittain she wrote from a hospital in Etaples, Northern France: 

‘We have heaps of gassed cases at present who came in a day or two ago; there are ten in this ward alone. I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case - to say nothing of ten cases - of mustard gas in its early stages - could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great mustard coloured suppurating blisters, with blinded eyes - sometimes temporally, sometimes permanently - all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. The only thing one can say it that such severe cases don't last long; either they die soon or else improve - usually the former; they certainly don't reach England in the state we have them here, and yet people persist in saying that God made War, when there are such inventions of the Devil about.’

For many people no doubt, ‘Gassed’ was judged a success for the way in which it symbolised the virtues of British soldiers. According to the Royal Academy's President Sir Aston Webb the painting showed 'how the bravery of our men had persisted in spite of the most devilish inventions.'

In its details the painting is symbolic of other aspects of the conflict. Rather than protesting at the horror of such new weapons of war the artist emphasises the calm and disciplined reaction of the ten victims in the central group, blinded and bandaged though they are.

Guided by and trusting implicitly in the orderly at the head of the line they follow instructions to the letter The third soldier in the queue, his knee raised at a right angle, has over-reacted to the warning about a step on to the duckboard leading to the dressing station.

A hint of the order and stability within the dressing station itself is given in the tautness of the guy ropes which secure it. The lines of soldiers are heading to what might almost be a church for spiritual comfort as well as medical care. Modern commentators from the Imperial War Museums have written of ‘connotations of a religious procession’ in relation to the painting and of ‘a suggestion of redemption as the men are led off to the medical tents’.

The blinded men in the foreground wait patiently – there is no overt show of suffering, no faces contorted in pain. One man is drinking from a flask. They await their turn obediently, to be called up in endless groups.

Above the second group fighter planes of an unnamed air force or forces can be spotted, insect-like in the distance. A dogfight? Or just a kind of dance in the sky, oblivious to the suffering of the men below.

Similarly distant, glimpsed between the legs of the men in the first group, uninjured men play association football in blue and red shirts. ‘Seemingly unconcerned at the suffering all around them’, as the late Roger Tolson from the Imperial War Museums wrote in a 2010 article for the BBC.

Could they symbolize, in a hint from the artist, the human selfishness that prevails in war? Or, worse, the heartlessness of a government which needed to reassure the public that there were plenty more young and healthy flowers from the Allies’ side willing to be sacrificed?

'Sport', a woodcut by the German artist Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), whose work appeared prominently in the Berlin pacifist journal Die Aktion in the 1920s

In his 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn the English novelist George Orwell wrote that the Battle of Waterloo was probably won on the playing-fields of Eton, though he also added that ‘the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there’.   

Photo of George Orwell in 1943 which appears in an old accreditation for the Branch of the National Union of Journalists (BNUJ). Image credit: Wikipedia 

Four years later in the political magazine Tribune he wrote that serious sport was 'war minus the shooting'. He argued that sport was not a means of promoting peace between nations but was more likely to cause tensions than solve them.

The footballers continue with their game, ignoring the soldier in the central group who has turned away from us to vomit in full view of the players. Has he turned away to preserve his own dignity, heedless of the fact that his fellow-soldiers cannot witness his distress? Is the artist reinforcing the message that the players are simply too selfishly absorbed in their game to show compassion? By having the soldier turn away, the artist is saving the viewer from embarrassment. Is Sargeant plainly telling us that we, society, are too squeamish to bear witness and protest at the use of these barbaric new weapons?

Some of these questions could suggest that ‘Gassed’ does after all contain the anti-war message that was absent from the painting according to Forster and others. There could indeed be conflicting ideas within the work, as critic Roger Tolson wrote: ‘Sargent here depicts soldiers who are displaying a heroic dignity, the sons of the salon society that he has spent his career flattering. Are they walking towards the Christ-like redemption that their bravery and sacrifice has earned? Or is the sun setting on the sort of society that allows its 'gilded' youth to be wasted in a cruel war? In this painting Sargent is holding together two ideas, developed as society was trying to make sense of the war and its cost.’ 

Murray Levick photographed by Herbert Ponting skinning a penguin on board the Terra Nova. Image credit: Wikipedia

Budleigh people who met former resident Surgeon-Commander Murray Levick may know that the blind soldiers of WW1 were not treated as well as they should have been after the war. Many of them sought careers as physiotherapists, but faced opposition from the medical establishment of the day.

Murray Levick is best known as an Antarctic explorer who took part in Captain Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1913, but as a naval surgeon during WW1 he was also a champion of the war’s blinded soldiers. He died in 1956, following his retirement to Budleigh.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Baron Fraser of Lonsdale, pictured above, was the second Chairman of the charity St Dunstan's, now known as Blind Veterans UK. Like his predecessor Sir Arthur Pearson, he had lost his sight during WW1 but went on to have a successful career as a politician and businessman. In a tribute that he wrote in 1956 following Murray Levick’s death he explained how doctors in the post-WW1 era held tenaciously to the view that it would be dangerous for blind veterans to work as masseurs or physiotherapists, claiming for example that they would not be able to see their patients' reactions, and that they would even electrocute or burn their patients. The masseurs' organisation, he explained, ‘partly out of prejudice and partly in deference to the doctors' views, refused to examine our men or to give them a certificate for medical electricity’.

Murray Levick’s intervention was crucial. Thanks to his efforts, an examination was devised to qualify blind veterans with the necessary certificate and many of them found rewarding careers as masseurs and physiotherapists. The courage and determination shown by Murray Levick was recalled by Baron Fraser in his tribute: ‘He will be remembered by all who admire gallant explorers, but by us as one who helped us win a notable battle that has made a deal of difference to all blind physiotherapists the world over and, indirectly, to the blind world.’

Murray Levick’s efforts on behalf of the blinded soldiers of WW1 were recognised in the 2011/2012 ‘Survival!’ exhibition at Budleigh’s Fairlynch Museum. 

I remember designing that poster!